02 December 2008

Breaking into the time capsule

When I say that I've blogged in fits and starts for about ten years now, most people don't believe me.

Here's a representative week from February 1999 on my old web site:

"A New Germ Theory" (Judith Hooper, Atlantic Monthly, February 1999) describes the work of scientists Paul Ewald and Geoffrey Cochran, who have applied the maxims of evolutionary biology to the study of infectious diseases with startling and provocative results. Try this on for size: they hypothesize, and with their colleagues are amassing evidence to prove, that many forms of heart disease, many cancers, and some of the major mental illnesses might actually be caused by pathogens (viruses and bacteria). (19 February 1999)

Do you like maps? Boy, I do. I was tickled to discover Tiger, a service of the US Census Bureau. Give Tiger the latitude and longitude you need, and Tiger gives you a map. You can even use it from your own web site, passing the query through the URL. Here's Manhattan.(19 February 1999)

Jean Q. Publique buys his daily loaf: behold the BaguetteCam.(17 February 1999 - and a tip of the beret to Carrie)

Microsoft's webzine Slate just went free again, after an abortive attempt to support itself on a subscription revenue model. Is content dead? No, but people won't pay for it directly unless it's about making money or looking at pictures of naked people. So Slate is going free-content, selling ad space and hoping for the best... the traditional magazine publishing model.(11 February 1999)